


quid pro quo, my dear

by violentdarlings



Series: Entrapment Boning [5]
Category: Entrapment (1999)
Genre: Entrapment, F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, Underloved Fandom, why does S&M have to creep into every part of my life?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 18:32:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1788988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mac has a request for Gin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	quid pro quo, my dear

**Author's Note:**

> Someone send me to rehab. Any of them, I'm not picky. 'Gratuititous smut' rehab or 'why can't I stop writing this pairing' rehab or 'inappropriate sexual thoughts about fictional characters' rehab.

“You might like it,” Mac coaxes, and she flushes all the way down to her collarbones as she pores over a map. Her partner looks outrageously calm and collected, the smug idiot, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, for once without his jacket. The weather is slowly warming, but right now, in the dining room, the temperature has dropped to sub zero.

Gin clenches a fist beneath the table and appeals to a higher power for patience. “Shut up. I don’t even want to talk to you. We’re supposed to be working!”

“You know as well as I do there’s no point to further planning until the gear arrives,” he retorts, bracing his elbows on the dining table and lifting a dark eyebrow just because he knows it gets her hot. Gin scowls at him.

“Knowing my luck, it’ll arrive just as you’ve convinced me to do it, you wily bastard. Besides, where do you even get the gear from these days? It’s not like you can call Thibideaux up for it.”

“I have my ways,” he says with an air of great self-satisfaction. “Did I tell you? Poor Thibideaux had an unfortunate… accident.” She regards him with suspicion.

“An ‘accident’ accident or a ‘you paid someone to run him over’ accident?” Mac taps his nose with what she imagines is supposed to be an enigmatic smile, but to her he just looks smug.

“Six of one,” he says, his accent and tone lending more than a hint of threat to the words. It’s moments like this that she remembers being forced into the icy water of the lake at Bedford Palace, coming up spluttering and terrified. Not just of the water filling her mouth and nose; no, more frightening was the expression of cold fury in Mac’s eyes, and behind that rage was a glimmer of hurt. And she knows very well by now that nothing fuels anger like that mingled sensation of betrayal and grief. Hadn’t she learnt that, when Green had lifted the chunk of stone that should have been her precious mask? And making her way back through the slums, fury building in her veins like poison, until she could have killed him but for the faint knowledge that she needed him for the job. The job that had occupied her for five years, that had eventuated in the one billion dollars that kept them both off the radar for the past few months.

“Gin? You’re off in your own little world.” His voice cuts through the haze of thought and brings her back to here and now. She’d never tell him, not for all the art in the world and every dollar ever minted, that she has nightmares of waking up gasping and terrified, certain she is still drowning.

“I’m not doing it,” she tells him, and stalks off to brood on the roof. It would be very impressive, except she can hear him laughing as she heads up the stairs. She mutters four letter words under her breath.

_xx_

“It’s just one thing,” she tells herself as she prepares dinner. From the kitchen she can hear Mac speaking fluent and very irate French into a phone as he berates their new supplier on the delay. She dices potatoes with a particular viciousness; she’s not sure who she’s angry with. “After everything, and this is what you dig your heels in over?”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Mac says from the doorway, his familiar voice dark and sensual.

“I liked you better when you were speaking French,” she replies without looking at him. “I don’t understand the fascination, Mac.”

“What’s not to understand?” he asks. “You know how I feel about every inch of you. Why wouldn’t I want to watch you do that?”

“It’s demeaning,” she grumbles, flushing to the roots of her hair.

“It’s exquisite,” he replies, and she mutilates a hapless potato with vengeance in her heart.

“I don’t even do that, anyway,” she murmurs, knowing full well she’s lying. And at that, he chuckles. Full-throated and heavy with amusement, and she grimly contemplates flinging a potato chunk at his forehead.

“Gin, dear. Don’t try that one with me. I know perfectly well you do. The first night you stayed here, in fact. And I believe you told me yourself, some time ago.”

She chooses to go with the easiest mode of attack. “I knew you were spying on me!” she says triumphantly. “You’re a sick man.”

“I heard you,” he retorts impatiently and with a hint of anger; she’s wounded his pride. “I’m fairly sure they heard you appealing to God down in the village.”

“I could have just stubbed my toe,” she barks.

“Coupled with, ‘Oh, Mac, don’t stop?’”

Right then and there, she decides she hates him, but a wicked thought occurs to her, and she knows she’s won. “Fine,” she says, turning to lean against the counter, arms folded, the very picture of innocence. “I’ll do it for you.”

He knows her too well by now; suspicion crinkles his brow and narrows his eyes. “But?” he asks.

“You’ll have to reciprocate, my dear,” she says, and just the thought of it sends shivers of want throughout her body. Okay, maybe she gets the fascination of it now. She turns back to the potatoes, finishing her task and dumping them in a saucepan. “You want to watch me get myself off? Then those are my terms. It’s only fair.” She starts in on the carrots, realising too late that Mac is uncharacteristically silent. She peers over her shoulder. “Mac?”

But he’s gone.

_xx_

The size of the castle means that Mac-hunting takes some stamina and creativity, especially because he’s lived here far longer than she has. Gin abandons dinner and starts at the bottom, in the old dungeons he uses as storage space and the cellar, advancing floor by floor until she reaches the attic. Here, as promised long ago, there is a suit of armour, dusty and scratched, but no crossed swords. Rather, a dented war axe that is probably worth a small fortune rests on a cupboard, and there are cabinets overflowing with the kind of curios and trinkets that she could spend all day exploring.

But it’s the man in the armchair staring out the window that holds her attention. “Mac,” she calls softly, disturbing the fragile peace of the air. Moths swoop around the lone light bulb overheard, and old stubs of candles with their wells of melted wax sit on the small wooden table beside him.

“What’s in the cabinets?” she asks, eyeing the stiff set of his shoulders, the furrows in his brow. Mac shrugs.

“I have no idea. They were here when I bought the castle. The idiot who owned it before me didn‘t even know the attic existed.”

“Jesus,” Gin breathes in astonishment. “And you’ve never gone through them?”

“You know my interests lie more in modern art. You’re the history buff out of the pair of us.” And he’s not wrong, either. Gingerly, she perches on the arm of the chair and drops her head down onto his shoulder, fingers carding through the soft hair at the nape of his neck. The muscles there are hard with tension and she presses a little deeper, working her thumbs steadily into the knots.

“I love you, Mac,” she tells him and feels a tremor run through him, almost like a flinch.

“And I you, Gin.” The response always makes a weird little fluttering warmth in her chest, and silently she wraps her arms around his shoulders. But it’s not enough. Fuck it, she decides abruptly, and slides down onto his lap, tucking her head into his neck, her lips against his throat. Once, she would have never done this, believing that to be the best she had to be all sharp edges and stone. Mac had changed that.

Really, Mac had changed everything.

“What I said before,” she begins gently, feeling the flutter of his pulse against her cheek. “If you don’t want to -”

“I wanted to,” Mac interrupts, voice almost a growl, breaking the silence harshly. “The things I want to do with you, Gin, they bewilder me. Ideas that never even seemed plausible suddenly hold an unshakeable allure.”

“That’s not so terrible,” she tells him lightly. “Hardly reason to come all the way up here to brood.”

Mac continues as though she’s said nothing, which is a rare thing indeed. “I wanted you from the moment I saw you,” he recalls quietly. “And then I despised you for it, for my own weakness. I could tell you’d never met someone you couldn’t -”

“Manipulate, beguile, or seduce?” Gin cuts in, and a wry smile comes to his face.

“Indeed. I didn’t want to be another of your conquests. But how I wanted you, and I still do. More, now, after all we’ve endured together.”

“Nothing you’re saying is upsetting me,” she tells him firmly. “So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is still that I want you,” he says softly, almost too quietly to be heard. “In every way. Tied up, held down, on your back, on your knees, everything.” He dips his head and murmurs in her ear, as though the words are too inappropriate even for a whisper. “I can picture you as clear as day, spread out on my bed, begging me to touch you. To fuck you. Restraints on your wrists, and I… I could do anything to you. You know that. And you like it.” Mac doesn’t blush, but there is a faint haze of pink on his cheeks beneath the scruff of his beard.

Gin has to take a few moments to marshal her thoughts. He’s speaking of things she only dreams of in the darkest, quietest hours before dawn. As though there’s something so unwholesome, something so forbidden about her fantasies that she’d never dare breathe a word of them in the light of day. But it’s night, now. Everything important between them, she’s discovered, always seems to happen at bloody night.

“And that’s what had you scurrying away with your tail between your legs?” she asks, knowing the hint of harshness in her voice will bring him back to himself. True to form, he scowls and taps her hard on the top of her head.

“Hardly,” he snaps, and she hides her smile behind her hand. “All of those things are not unfamiliar to me, Gin. It was that I wanted…”

“Wanted what?” she prompts when he falls silent.

“I wanted you to do the same to me,” he says in one breath so rapid she can barely distinguish the words from one another. “Damn it, Gin. Must I spell it out?”

“No,” she replies slowly. “I think I get it.” Mutely, he touches his lips to her forehead; she can feel the relief coming off him in waves. “But really, Mac,” she begins, because it’s in her nature to needle at him, but he knows her too well.

He crushes his lips to hers, and kisses the sarcasm straight off her tongue. But because she’s stubborn, and a little foolish, and because she loves him, she says, “Let’s go find those handcuffs, then.”

“But to use on which of us?” he asks as she pulls him to his feet, and she considers it for only a moment before proffering a clenched fist. He’s looking at her like she’s lost her mind. “A fistfight?” he mocks dryly. “Such a violent little thing you are, Gin.”

“I thought you liked my ‘violent little thing’ ways, Mac,” she retorts. “Rock paper scissors.”

“What happened to the classic flip a coin?” he drawls, even as he bunches his hand into a fist.

“It went the same way of your good old fashioned loot, my dear,” Gin says in a grave tone that belies the ridiculous grin on her face.

“Hmm,” Mac hums, eyeing the results. “Would you look at that, Gin.” Her hand is flat, fingers spread, and that delicious, still a little unfamiliar darkness of desire is in his eyes. “It appears that scissors beats paper.”

“Quite,” she replies. “But you’ll have to catch me first.” Gin darts for the stairs, hearing his heavy tread behind her, and they both know, by now, that she’ll willingly let herself be caught.

As long as it’s him pursuing her.


End file.
